Press 'X' to Star Wars
Revisiting Newsradio is a slippery proposition, as you sometimes wind up with awkwardly prophetic vignettes like Joe Rogan helping an idle uhinged billionaire try to become president. Or Joe Rogan saying the kind of shit Joe Rogan still says followed by a studio audience laughing at how obviously dumb it is. Or Joe Rogan looking like a normal human instead of a fetid squat testosterone-addled toad-man that secretes excess ruminant tallow from his pores instead of neurotoxins. To add a layer of unreality onto things, if you watch the DVD commentaries, when they do discuss Rogan, all of the jokes are about his stint as a host on Fear Factor instead of at the zenith of an immense propaganda enterprise hawking supplements and horse paste for hundreds of millions of dollars. Fortunately, although he appears in most episodes, his involvement is usually limited, but the taint remains.
Last night I rewatched one of my favorite episodes, "Arcade", in which events conspire for series lead Dave Foley to be reintroduced to the bane of his high school existence, an arcade cabinet called Stargate Defender that hooks him to the point that he's unable to stop playing despite adverse consequences. It's good, it's on Tubi, and you should watch it if you can get past the Rogan thing.
My rewatch was triggered by thinking about the way videogames have the ablility to enable this kind of gluttonous jag. I wrote about this in one of these newsletters over a decade ago, saying:
It strikes me that this level of engagement isn't as unusual in video games as it is in other media, though it's still rare enough that I don't end up in constant reverie very often, but the depth of it has always intrigued and terrified me. I think it's something particular about the way we play, the physicality of it, that deepens our connection even after the machine is off, and makes us anxious for what comes next. Thankfully, I've always found this to be a limited phenomenon, and have been capable of pulling back from a particular game...eventually.
This was inspired by several excessively long sessions of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a game that I have sunk an obscene number of hours into over the years. It's a reboot of a 1990s tactics game that sees you managing a cadre of alien-fighting soldiers in turn-based combat on an isometric battlefield, while also overseeing the finances and strategy of the anti-alien resistance. When you describe it in broad terms, it sounds less than compelling, but like most great meals, the real secret is in the sauce, and XCOM's sauce is how it blends player choice, procedural generation, and a surprisingly deep storyline to create a game I find next to impossible to put down. The series has been largely dormant since 2017 or so, and the studio that made it disbanded the dev team, making the likelihood of a new game in the series vanishingly small. So it was with some surprise that I learned that many of the original developers and artists had formed a new studio would be releasing a game that played like XCOM, but took place in the Star Wars universe.
Like XCOM, Star Wars Zero Company lets you manage a small band of resistance fighters against a nefarious alien threat. It features some graphical and mechanical updates, but is recognizably aping the look and feel of the earlier games, down to the interstitial animations having the same style and rhythm as the earlier games. There's slightly less customization available, which means I can't easily recreate my favorite run of XCOM in which my squad was composed entirely of characters from Frasier, but it's a small price to pay for regaining that compulsion to start one more turn even as your dog worriedly presses its muzzle into your leg because you have usually been in bed for three hours by this point in the evening. It's a gift and a curse.
The thing I find myself surprisingly charmed by is how they've chosen to situate the game in established Star Wars canon. It takes place alongside the late Clone Wars era, and has managed to weave in just enough galactic history and politics to make the specific story they're telling compelling. There's characters on your team sympathetic to either the Republic or the Separatists, and they have reasons grounded in their personal histories that come out over the course of the game. Your main character's executive officer, for instance is a Space Libertarian who can't stop telling you why Republic taxation is theft, but is otherwise very charming. She has a little spicy flirtation going on with the Republic officer you're running missions for that is a lot of fun to watch. I keep expecting him to tell me about the great new holotape he's viewing, Darth Plagueius Shrugged. I've spent a lot of my holiday weekend running missions to keep my little mercenary company funded and functioning, to the detriment of my real life responsibilities, which is always the sign of a great videogame.
